Richard Henderson

What I admire most about Henderson is how quietly he changed everything. There's no flashy persona here, no social media, no glamour, just an Edinburgh-born scientist who spent decades coaxing biological molecules into focus under an electron microscope. That patience earned him a share of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, but the prize feels almost incidental to the work itself. In an age obsessed with visibility, I find something deeply refreshing about a man who let his results speak and stayed invisible. He reshaped cryo-electron microscopy and let the field, not himself, take the spotlight.

Richard Henderson (born 19 July 1945) is a British molecular biologist and biophysicist and pioneer in the field of electron microscopy of biological molecules. Henderson shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2017 with Jacques Dubochet and Joachim Frank.

Summary adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Name (English)

Richard Henderson

Name (Japanese)

リチャード・ヘンダーソン

Reading

りちゃーど・へんだーそん

Born

July 19, 1945 (age 80)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Cancer / Rooster

Origin

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Blood type

Private

Height

Private

Agency

Private

Occupation

molecular biologist / biochemist / chemist / crystallographer / biologist

Elementary school

Private

Junior high

Private

High school

Boroughmuir High School

University

University of Cambridge

Awards & achievements

• Fellow of the Royal Society
• 1990 Rosenstiel Award
• 1980 Ernst Ruska Prize
• 1978 William Bate Hardy Prize
• 2016 Alexander Hollaender Award in Biophysics
• 1984 Sir Hans Krebs Medal
• 1999 Gregori Aminoff Prize
• 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Spouse

Private

Children

Private

Parents

Private

Siblings

Private

Motto

Private

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AA%E3%83%81%E3%83%A3%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89%E3%83%BB%E3%83%98%E3%83%B3%E3%83%80%E3%83%BC%E3%82%BD%E3%83%B3

Tags

• molecular biologist
• biochemist
• chemist

Last updated

2026-06-02

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public items are marked "Private / Unknown". English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.